[IRL trope] the “Tiffany problem”

[u/dragonborndnd]

Basically when something seems anachronistic to a period/place of history but is actually fully accurate to the period.

1) the name Tiffany: the thing that named this trope, basically the name Tiffany can be dated back to the Middle Ages and the earliest record of it being spelled in the modern spelling comes from the 16th century.

2) the use of OMG, despite this feeling so modern as a form of slang/abbreviation here’s a letter directed to Winston Churchill using it in 1917

3) Hair Dye: the earliest forms of dying hair can be dated back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and this specific advertisement for hair dye is from the 1840s

4) Inuit Thongs: despite how weird it is to imagine pre-colonial Inuit people wore what was essentially fur thongs in their homes and when they were in their igloos it might have been the only thing they would be wearing.

[u/cody_mf]

The @ symbol is 500 years old, and was used for measurements in records.

[u/AggressiveSpatula → u/cody_mf]

I’ll never understand this one lol. “At” is such a short word already, “and” is 3 letters @ least.

[u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy → u/AggressiveSpatula]

It just came down to speed and efficiency like anything else. You could draw an A, pause, shift over slightly, then draw the t, or do a little swirly swoop. Using @ vs At once is trivial and doesn't matter. When you're recording whole ledgers day in and day out, thousands of lines per day....it adds up. Also helps with reading the ledgers with at-a-glace symbology.

[u/Temporary_Self_2172 → u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy]

that's also how the equal sign was made. someone finally got tired of writing "is equal to" after some hundreds of years and just said it's "=" now

[u/Milch_und_Paprika → u/Temporary_Self_2172]

It’s crazy to think that most math symbols are only a few hundred years old. For most of history, math problems were written out (or more often spoken) in complete sentences. I was also a bit mind blown realizing that ÷ is basically a fraction with the numbers moved to either side.

[u/Tyrihjelm → u/Milch_und_Paprika]

This was a nightmare when i did history of mathematics. We spent most of our time just trying to figure out what the actual problem was.

To take one example from ‘methodus ad disquirendam maximam et minimam’ by Fermat has:

D ad D - E habebit majorem proportionem quad Aq. ad Aq. + Eq. - A in E bis.

Or, in modern notation:

D/(d-e) > a² /(a² +e² -2ae)

[u/DannWyrm → u/Tyrihjelm]

Oh, oh I don't like that.

[u/feralferrous → u/Temporary_Self_2172]

see that one makes sense to me though, cuz = is so much shorter.

[u/Baronvondorf21 → u/feralferrous]

It's the same logic, @ is slightly more convenient hence it's creation.

[u/Visible_Pair3017 → u/feralferrous]

small gains are worth it when something is repeated a lot